The stranger finally moved. His right arm, hidden until now by the angle of his stance, brushed aside the flap of his coat and raised a stubby rifle. Del heard the bolt slam forward. He also heard a faint click, and saw a small red eye blink to life just above the barrel.

Del knew a laser sight when he saw one.

The fog illuminated the pencil-thin beam of redness as it lanced across the drive and gardens and over Del’s shoulder, widening imperceptively as it went. The boy looked back to see a nickel-sized red dot dancing between the vampire’s silver eyes.

There was a muffled burping sound from across the yard, short and stuttering.

Del heard the bullets whir past his ear like a swarm of angry bees and then the smack as they hit home. The vampire stumbled backward. Del fell to the ground beside his brother and stayed there, well out of the line of fire. He looked back as the vampire stumbled about near the garden steps, disoriented. A large section of its brow and left eye socket were now gone. There was no blood. The only redness there was that of the dancing dot, still zigzagging across a face that the creature was too stunned to cover up.

“Shoot!” Del cried. “Blow its fuckin’ head off!!”

The machine gun burped again, and the vampire’s face all but ceased to exist.

Each round slammed home with deadly efficiency, jolting the thing backward a step or two, sending bone shards and tissue spinning into the air like confetti. Its left cheekbone and eye disappeared completely and part of the jaw with them before the dot strayed to the other side of its face and spread the destruction there as well. There was still no blood; it was like shooting animated clay. It stumbled on the garden steps and fell and the laser followed, ignoring the hands that tried to fend it off. Another burst tore through its raised right talon and continued the devastation on the face beyond. “Who are you!” it cried again before its lips were torn away and its sharp, yellow teeth scattered across the steps. It wailed and gagged on pieces of itself as it tried to escape, fumbling and feeling its way out of the gardens and then along the side of the house.

The gunman had crossed the drive turnaround and was now standing at the edge of the garden, still firing at the fleeing figure. The red dot danced along its right leg and the accompanying burst ripped open the calf muscle and destroyed the knee joint above it, spilling the vampire onto its face but still not stopping it. It just scrabbled onward on all fours, a crab in the crabgrass, moving blindly toward the sanctuary of the woods.